Beacon Of Light'

August 13, 1986|The Morning Call

To the Editor:

The "Prince William" letter (July 29) mentions the Meese porn commission, then announces the writer's gravamen: "But one fears where it may go."

Writers usually refer to a "threat" of censorship, but rarely, if ever, confess to a "fear." The fact that the oblique reference in the sentence quoted is not construed to be ambiguous - i.e., this fear doesn't need to be defined - is a revealing indication of the fear's pervasiveness. That prevailing phobia in our social pathology when the country is mired in a smut culture must be the moral equivalent for a medical dilemma where one feels compelled to refuse treatment to alleviate acute, prolonged diarrhea because of a morbid dread of constipation.

Even those who champion the anti-porn cause often do so with an aura of reluctant capitulation to appease an impulse in the conscience while apologetic in their role of party pooper. Such is the coercive reign over the wills of mortal subjects by the god of graphic images, whatever his name be.

But, in those reflections of the mirrors in the mind, isn't all this reverse restriction? There are tortuous turns on that map to Humanist Heaven.

Consider that a generation or so ago the sexual revolution avant garde projected itself into the public consciousness aggrandized in their claim to a beacon of light in the restricting darkness of censorship. "The body is beautiful" was their slogan (did anyone ever suggest that the image of God wasn't beautiful?). Yet, from their beginning they defiled and desecrated the human body in their dehumanizing art.

From a vantage point of hindsight the world may view that "beacon of light" for what it really was: ignis fatuus illuminating the euphotic layer of the animal brain.